Accommodations | Christravaganza Millerpalooza FAQs Contact Information Accommodations credit Michael Lovett A block of rooms have been reserved for guests at the Boston Marriott Newton 2345 Commonwealth Avenue Newton MA 02466 RESERVE A ROOM A shuttle service between the Boston Marriott Newton hotel and the Brandeis campus will be provided for guests staying at the Marriott Details about this shuttle service will be made available as we get closer to the event Proudly powered

FAQs | Christravaganza Millerpalooza the Waltham area Here are a few frequently attended restaurants in Waltham Solea Flank Brandeis list of Waltham restaurants How do I get to Brandeis Brandeis directions Where should I park on campus You should park in either the T lot or the H lot Select the parking option on the Brandeis map How do I get to the Marriott Marriott directions Do you have phone numbers for local cab

Science at Brandeis biomolecules The Herzfeld group has now bridged the gap between experiment and theory by using a model that efficiently balances three subtle features of water molecules polarizability H sharing and H transfer that control the ambient behavior of the liquid The model predicts that OH prefers the air water interface while H avoids it consistent with observations of the response of air bubbles in water to an applied electric field Bai C Herzfeld J Surface Propensities of the Self Ions of Water ACS Central Science 2016 Filed Under chemistry Tagged With computational chemistry Herzfeld lab surface chemistry water Sleep suppresses brain rebalancing March 18 2016 By division of science Why humans and other animals sleep is one of the remaining deep mysteries of physiology One prominent theory in neuroscience is that sleep is when the brain replays memories offline to better encode them memory consolidation A prominent and competing theory is that sleep is important for re balancing activity in brain networks that have been perturbed during learning while awake Such rebalancing of brain activity involves homeostatic plasticity mechanisms that were first discovered at Brandeis University and have been thoroughly studied by a number of Brandeis labs including the Turrigiano lab Now a study from the Turrigiano lab just published in the journal Cell shows that these homeostatic mechanisms are indeed gated by sleep and wake but in the opposite direction from that theorized previously homeostatic brain rebalancing occurs exclusively when animals are awake and is suppressed by sleep These findings raise the intriguing possibility that different forms of brain plasticity for example those involved in memory consolidation and those involved in homeostatic rebalancing must be temporally segregated from each other to prevent interference The requirement that neurons carefully maintain an average firing rate much like the thermostat in a house senses and maintains temperature has long been suggested by computational work Without homeostatic thermostat like control of firing rates models of neural networks cannot learn and drift into states of epilepsy like saturation or complete quiescence Much of the work in discovering and describing candidate mechanisms continues to be conducted at Brandeis In 2013 the Turrigiano Lab provided the first in vivo evidence for firing rate homeostasis in the mammalian brain lab members recorded the activity of individual neurons in the visual cortex of freely behaving rat pups for 8h per day across a nine day period during which vision through one eye was occluded The activity of neurons initially dropped but over the next 4 days firing rates came back to basal levels despite the visual occlusion In essence these experiments confirmed what had long been suspected the activity of neurons in intact brains is indeed homeostatically governed Due to the unique opportunity to study a fundamental mechanism of brain plasticity in an unrestrained animal the lab has been probing the possibility of an intersection between an animal s behavior and homeostatic plasticity In order to truly evaluate possible circadian and behavioral influences on neuronal homeostasis it was necessary to capture the entire 9 day experiment rather than evaluate snapshots of each day For this work the Turrigiano Lab had to find creative computational solutions to recording many terabytes of data necessary to follow the activity of single neurons without interruption for more than 200 hours Ultimately these data revealed that the homeostatic regulation of neuronal activity in the cortex is gated by sleep and wake states In a surprising and unpredicted twist the homeostatic recovery of activity occurred almost exclusively during periods of activity and was inhibited during sleep Prior predictions either assumed no role for behavioral state or that sleeping would account for homeostasis Finally the lab established evidence for a causal role for active waking by artificially enhancing natural waking periods during the homeostatic rebound When animals were kept awake homeostatic plasticity was further enhanced This finding opens doors onto a new field of understanding the behavioral environmental and circadian influences on homeostatic plasticity mechanisms in the brain Some of the key questions that immediately beg to be answered include What it is about sleep that precludes the expression of homeostatic plasticity How is it possible that mechanisms requiring complex patterns of transcription translation trafficking and modification can be modulated on the short timescales of behavioral state transitions in rodents And finally how generalizable is this finding As homeostasis is bidirectional does a shift in the opposite direction similarly require wake or does the change in sign allow for new rules in expression Authors on the paper include postdoctoral fellow Keith Hengen Neuroscience grad student Alejandro Torrado Pachedo and Neuroscience undergraduate James McGregor 14 now in grad school at Emory Hengen KB Torrado Pacheco A McGregor JN Van Hooser SD Turrigiano GG Neuronal Firing Rate Homeostasis is Inhibited by Sleep and Promoted by Wake Cell 2016 Filed Under grad students Neuroscience postdocs Undergrads Tagged With electrophysiology homeostasis neuroscience sleep Turrigiano lab Introduction to Microfluidics Technology June 13 17 2016 March 10 2016 By DivSciWeb 2016 MRSEC Summer Course Announcement Registration for our annual one week summer course Introduction to Microfluidics Technology at Brandeis University near Boston MA is now open The application deadline is March 31 2016 Introduction to Microfluidics Technology is a hands on laboratory course sponsored by the National Science Foundation s Bioinspired Soft Materials Research Science and Engineering Center MRSEC at Brandeis It will be offered during the week of June 13 17 2016 The course is intended for graduate students post docs faculty and industrial scientists engineers interested in utilizing microfluidic technology in their work both in the physical and life sciences The course does not assume any specific prerequisites Introduction to Microfluidics Technology June 13 17 2016 will be taught by Dr Nathan Tompkins The 750 fee covers course tuition housing in double occupancy rooms and breakfast lunch coffee from Monday through Friday Single rooms are not available Local students who do not need housing will pay a non resident fee of 500 cash and check only please More information

Physics at Brandeis to the ones mounted in every classroom For the PIM the lens that projects the image onto the screen is removed and replaced with optics often the same lens in reverse that shrinks the image down so that it can be focused through the microscope objective onto the sample The light coming from the projector which is the illumination source for the microscope can be modified in realtime based on the image being captured by the camera Thus the illumination is not only programmable but can also be algorithmic and provide active feedback This new publication in the American Journal of Physics which is published by the American Association of Physics Teachers is intended to help small teaching and research labs across the country develop their own PIMs to be built and used by undergraduate students The paper includes schematics and parts lists for the hardware as well as instructions and demonstration code for the software Any other questions can be directed to the authors Nate Tompkins and Seth Fraden Comments No Comments Categories Uncategorized Nature News Feature Highlights Dogic Lab Active Matter Research 6 01 2016 Click to view slideshow Biological material is constantly consuming energy to make things move organize information such as DNA or divide cells for reproduction but building a fundamental theory which encompasses all of the features of biological matter is no easy task The burgeoning field of active matter aims to understand these complex biological phenomena through physics Active matter research has seen rapid growth over the last decade but linking existing active matter theories with experimental tests has not been possible until recently An explosion of biologically based and synthetic experimental systems as well as more detailed theories have arrived in recent years and some of these foundational experiments have been conducted here at Brandeis University Recently a Nature News Feature The Physics of Life has highlighted work from Zvonimir Dogic s lab in an article about the field of active matter and the physics which endeavors to understand biology Comments No Comments Categories Uncategorized Resolving the magnetic field around the galaxy s central black hole 7 12 2015 Credit M Weiss CfA On December 4 the journal Science Vol 350 no 6265 p 1242 published a paper titled Resolved magnetic field structure and variability near the event horizon of Sagittarius A abstract The paper reports that the Event Horizon Telescope has detected strong magnetic fields around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy John Wardle Professor of Astrophysics at Brandeis is one of the lead authors A co author is Michael Kosowsky 14 who worked on the project as a summer research project at the MIT Haystack observatory as a junior physics major and is now an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Harvard Near a black hole differential rotation of a magnetized accretion disk is thought to produce an instability that amplifies weak magnetic fields driving accretion and outflow These magnetic fields would naturally give rise to the observed synchrotron emission in galaxy cores and to the formation of relativistic jets but no observations to date have been able to resolve the expected horizon scale magnetic field structure The paper reports interferometric observations made with antennas in Hawaii California and Arizona at 1 3 millimeter wavelength that spatially resolve the linearly polarized emission from the Galactic Center supermassive black hole Sagittarius A We have found evidence for partially ordered magnetic fields near the event horizon on scales of 6 Schwarzschild radii and we have detected and localized the intra hour variability associated with these fields The above image is an artist s impression With the planned addition of antennas in Mexico Chile Europe and the South Pole the Event Horizon Telescope will be able to make true images with angular resolution of a few tens of microarcseconds Comments No Comments Categories Uncategorized Eisenbud Lectures in Mathematics and Physics October 27 29 2015 27 09 2015 The Departments of Physics and Mathematics are pleased to announce that this year s speaker for the Eisenbud Lectures in Mathematics and Physics is Jeffrey Harvey the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor in Physics at The University of Chicago The Eisenbud Lectures are the result of a generous donation by Leonard and Ruth Jean Eisenbud intended for a yearly set of lectures by an eminent physicist or mathematician working close to the interface of the two subjects Prof Harvey is a leader in nonperturbative quantum field theory and string theory known for elegant incisive and influential work on anomalies solitons and instantons string duality black holes in string theory and conformal field theory for string compactifications He was one of the members of the Princeton String Quartet which discovered and developed the heterotic string He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Physical Society He is currently an Academic Trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ and a member of the Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee These lectures promise to be enlightening and entertaining in equal measure The lectures will take place at Brandeis University from October 27 29 2015 The first lecture on Tuesday October 27 will be a colloquium style lecture titled A Physicist Under The Spell of Ramanujan and Moonshine and will be in Abelson room 131 at 4PM a reception will follow The second lecture on Wednesday October 28 Mock Modular Forms in Mathematics and Physics will take place in Abelson 131 at 4PM The final lecture Umbral Moonshine will take place in Abelson 333 at 11AM Refreshments will be served 15 minutes prior to each talk We hope to see you all at what promises to be a very exciting series of talks Albion Lawrence Dept of Physics and Bong Lian Dept of Mathematics Comments No Comments Categories Eisenbud Mathematics Physics Pairs of Supermassive Black Holes May Be Rarer Than Earlier Thought 25 09 2015 Image by David

News | Jane Kondev Group | Physical Biology of the Cell extent to which it is retained from initiation how long it remains attached and its consequences for transcription regulation were unclear In this study Tim Harden and his collaborators used a novel multi wavelength single molecule fluorescence microscopy approach to directly observe and quantitatively characterize the dynamic interactions of the σ 70 protein with bacterial RNA polymerase molecules in vitro during active RNA synthesis Harden is a Brandeis Physics Ph D student who is jointly advised by Jeff Gelles and Jane Kondev The study demonstrates by direct observation that actively elongating polymerase molecules can retain σ 70 from initiation into the elongation phase of transcription shows that retained σ 70 subunits dissociate so slowly that most are still present on the elongation complex at the end of a long gene and proves that only the subpopulation of elongating polymerases with bound σ 70 recognize a class of transcriptional pause sequences which in some contexts play a well established role in regulating gene expression More generally this study provides the first quantitative framework that defines the post initiation roles of σ 70 information that is essential to the understanding of global transcription regulation in bacteria Furthermore the work demonstrates a general